A trip halfway across the state of New York wasn’t how Bret Lutz had planned to spend a week of his summer vacation.

But the history teacher at Centreville Junior High was happy to modify his schedule after being chosen as one of 40 teachers nationwide to participate in an enrichment session funded and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Lutz found out about his good fortune in April, giving him three months to prepare for a thorough study of the Erie Canal. He said the 363-mile waterway played a major, albeit often overlooked, role in the population growth of what is now the Midwest — at the time called the Northwest.

“The Erie Canal resulted in many changes in so many ways, from commerce and transportation, to a migration of people from east to west,” Lutz said.

Lutz, an educator for 24 years, will share details of his seven-day research of the canal at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Nottawa Township Library.

Lutz was one of three Michigan teachers selected from a pool of almost 300 vying for one of 40 positions on the Erie Canal team. The canal was one of many locations worldwide the National Endowment for the Humanities offers through its study program.

The Civil War and the National Archives in Washington are the most sought-after locations in North America, Lutz said. The Erie Canal was a recently added location and Lutz said learning more about it was a treat.

“It was probably the single-biggest educational experience in my life,” Lutz said. “To have the opportunity to spend a full week with 39 other teachers and study one topic of such interest was phenomenal.”

In advance of the on-site study, Lutz and his peers were required to complete a checklist, which included reading four books detailing the history of the canal and attending two speaking engagements featuring the authors of those books.

A stipend provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities supplemented Lutz’s gas, food and expenses associated with the trip to the group’s headquarters at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, N.Y. The team slept in on-campus dorms and made daily excursions to various points along the canal route.

“We were at the western end of the canal and our longest day was a 14-hour day, when we went east all the way to Syracuse, which was about two-thirds of the way to the other end of the canal in Albany,” Lutz said. “We learned everything related to the canal that we could in seven days, but the biggest impact was the economics of the Erie Canal.”

He explained that the influence of the canal’s opening in 1825 — following eight years of construction at a cost of $7.1 million — was at the time the equivalent to the opening of a new interstate highway today.

Page 2 of 2 - Communities sprung up along the canal, the doors to shipping from the Atlantic Ocean into Lake Erie were open and the financial elite immediately found a new source of travel.

“The impact on commerce was so great, in fact, that the price of food dropped because shipping suddenly provided a way to haul great quantities of basics from New York City (via the Hudson River to the Erie Canal) to what was then far-away places like Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit,” Lutz said.

The canal’s impact can still be seen today, with Gold Medal Flour in Rochester, N.Y., and salt shipped out of Syracuse thanks to its proximity to natural salt springs.

In another example, the city of Pittsford, N.Y., has turned its waterfront downtown into a tourist destination, complete with shopping, restaurants and condominiums.

“We were lucky to learn more about almost every aspect of the Erie Canal … some of the old postcards we saw at the Erie Canal museum in Syracuse really romanticized it,” he said.

A portion of Lutz’s presentation also will center on the eventual development and opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959 and its adverse impact on the Erie Canal.

“There’s a whole culture out there because of the Erie Canal, a culture of food, music, communities that rose and died with the Erie Canal, immigrants who moved westward,” Lutz said. “The Erie Canal had far-reaching effects that went way beyond it being just a body of water.”

Lutz said he would like to apply for another session next summer, as he has an especially keen interest in the War of 1812 and a weeklong session is offered in Toledo, Ohio.